Saturday, August 21, 2010

i leave deer valley tomorrow. though there have been moments of interruption, the past three weeks have been the closest i have come to solitude. i have spent today taking inventory of my belongings - those i've brought with me, those i've collected and those i've created. here are some of the things i've encountered.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Since July 31st, I had my first encounter with company this week. Monday afternoon Christelle, Katerina and I drove almost 9 hours in total to see the great earthwork - Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. We had to take absolute backroads, putting along terrain that was constantly changing. We got lost several times on the way to the Jetty, and as a result saw the most incredible landscape of the Great Salt Lake, or as we called it - the Ancient Ocean. Moving from pavement to gravel to dirt, we wound our way through fields and fields, eventually making it to Rozel Point - a cove of the Ancient Ocean just before the Spiral Jetty. The terrain there was otherworldly - made of salt, air bubbles and animal tracks that outweighed the three of us put together. I felt as though I was on the astral plane - moonwalking over the air bubbles into the infinite unknown. The salt bed was so vast and so flat you couldn't make out where the lake began at all. The terrain became even more cosmic when we finally found the Jetty. The salt was pink and crystalline under my feet. I picked up large flats of salt to harvest at home as well as small rocks from the middle of the spiral. At this time, the Jetty is not submerged. The salt bed is so vast around it that you can walk almost a mile into the lake beyond the Jetty, and can cut between spirals on salty ground. In fact, beyond the Jetty was where I realized the weight of this experience. I looked out onto this field of pink to the distance where grey mountains rose from the lake like islands. Beyond the pink was a glassy surface that sparkled, silvery and blue. I looked behind me at Christelle and Katerina scattered along the Jetty, and felt so in love with the experience I was having. Breaking the glass a crane rose out of the water with silvery grace, and I began to cry at the beauty I couldn't believe I was seeing. Soon a few other cranes came to meet it. We were alone with the jetty and the cranes as the sun went down. Driving back in darkness I realized I was leaving the most peaceful place I had ever been.